Public agency restructuring chaos

Although Boc announced last week that 9,200 civil servants are about to lose their jobs, ministers presented a number of jobs that will disappear, including vacancies, which have not been included in the budget since the beginning of this year. The strangest examples are the Ministry of Environment, which will cut 444 jobs, of which only 31 were filled, with the result an annual savings worth RON 17 million, or the Ministry of Development where, of 271 jobs eliminated, 240 were vacancies, and only 31 employees are in fact to be laid off, generating a monthly saving of €1 mln.

Based on the above figures, this would mean that an employee in the Ministry of Environment has a monthly salary exceeding RON 45,000 (about €10,600), while the average monthly salary of employees who are about to be laid off at the Ministry of Development is RON 32,000 (some €7,500). At the same time, representatives of some of the institutions which are about to be closed or included in other structures are complaining about the way in which agencies are being restructured, saying that disorganization is just beginning, considering that in some cases more jobs need to be eliminated than the actual number of positions.

Institutions such as the Romanian Agency for Foreign Investments (ARIS) and the National Institute for Administration (INA) will become divisions of other entities, while the state will maintain in their current form the Administration of the National Anti-Hail System, the Agency for Studying the Holocaust, and the National Re­search Institute for Sports.